News headlines in July 2011, page 31

Women in minority and indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to wide-ranging forms of violence, abuse and discrimination, according to a new report released Wednesday by Minority Rights Group International (MRG), a human rights group that works on behalf of minorities and indigenous peoples.

After protracted battles, women in Central America and southern Mexico have made headway in winning respect for their rights over the past decade, but the progress has been more formal than real, say women academics and activists.

A booming private security industry - triggered mostly by terrorist threats, domestic insurgencies and drug wars - deploys some 20 million armed personnel worldwide: twice the number of police officers, according to the annual 2011 Small Arms Survey released here.

Some 30 Spanish activists are occupying the embassy of their country in the Greek capital to demand that their government pressure Greece to allow the Freedom Flotilla II — 'Stay Human' to set sail for the Gaza Strip.

It was a tragedy on Mother's Day for Nuala Kerr. Her son Ronan had been a police constable for three months when he was murdered by dissident republicans in April.

Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each one-degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.

This is a very delicate period for Egypt. Confrontations between the secular-liberal front and the Islamist front, broadly understood, are growing increasingly polarised and often violent. A not always visible rift has opened between the student movement and the military, which is now often seen not as the guarantor of the people's demands for freedom and justice but as part of the old regime fighting for its survival. Peaceful protests are now banned and the press is muzzled, write Emma Bonino, vice president of the Italian Senate, and Saad Eddin Ibrahim, founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.

The decision by the German government to deliver 200 state-of-the-art armoured tanks to Saudi Arabia, despite the Wahhabi monarchy’s human rights record and its recent violent intervention in Bahrain to repress the popular rebellion against the local ruling family there, illustrates the rhetorical nature of Western support to the so called Arab democratic spring.

At least 11 people have been killed and dozens more wounded in shelling by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, around the besieged rebel enclave of Misurata, the rebels say.

The reputation of Brazilians as cheerful, happy-go-lucky people is starting to be reflected in the cold reality of statistics. A study has put numbers to that state of well-being by quantifying the significant reduction in social inequality in the last few years, an area in which South America's giant has outdone other emerging nations.